This Night’s Foul Work

XVI

‘WHAT DO WE EXPECT HIM TO DO? ASKED JUSTIN, WARMING HIS HANDS ON a cup of coffee in the keeper’s lodge.

‘What the New Recruit said. We want him to find out the secret of the earth. Your twelve-syllable verses sometimes make sense, Veyrenc.’

The daytime attendant looked at Veyrenc with curiosity.

‘He makes up poetry,’ Adamsberg explained.

‘On a day like this?’

‘Especially on a day like this.’

‘Right,’ said the keeper, accepting it. ‘Poetry – that complicates things, doesn’t it? But perhaps if you complicate things, you understand them better. And if you understand, you simplify. In the end.’

‘Yes,’ said Veyrenc, surprised.

Retancourt was back with them, looking rested. The commissaire had woken her simply by touching her shoulder, as if he was pressing a button. Through the window of the lodge, she watched as a blond giant crossed the street: he had shoulder-length hair, was wearing very few clothes, and his trousers were held up with string.

‘Here comes our interpreter,’ said Adamsberg. ‘He smiles a lot, but it’s not always easy to say why.’

Five minutes later, Mathias was kneeling alongside the grave, looking at the earth. Adamsberg signalled to his team to keep quiet. The earth doesn’t speak loudly, so you have to listen very carefully.

‘You haven’t touched anything?’ Mathias asked. ‘Nobody has moved the rose stems?’

‘No,’ said Danglard, ‘and that’s what’s so mysterious. The family scattered roses all over the grave, and the tombstone was placed on top. That proves the soil hasn’t been disturbed.’

‘There are stems and stems,’ said Mathias.

He moved his hand quickly from rose to rose, going round the grave on his knees and feeling the soil in various places, like a weaver testing the quality of silk. Then he raised his head and smiled at Adamsberg.

‘See it?’ he asked.

Adamsberg shook his head.

‘Some of the rose stems move if you just touch them lightly, but others are embedded well in. All the ones here are still where they were left,’ he said, pointing to the flowers at the bottom end of the grave. ‘But these ones are just loose on the surface – they’ve been moved. See?’

‘I’m listening,’ said Adamsberg, with a frown.

‘What it means is that someone has dug into the grave,’ said Mathias, carefully removing the flowers from the head of the grave, ‘but only part of it. Then the withered flowers were put back over the top, to make it look as if the earth hadn’t been disturbed. But, you know,’ he went on, standing up in a single movement, ‘it still shows. A man can move a rose stem and a thousand years later you can still tell he did it.’

Adamsberg nodded, impressed. So if he touched the petal of a flower tonight, in the dark, without telling anyone, a thousand years in the future some guy like Mathias would know all about it. The idea that all his actions might leave their ineradicable traces behind seemed a little alarming. But he was reassured by looking at the prehistorian, who was taking a trowel out of his back pocket and cleaning it with his fingers. Experts like Mathias didn’t grow on trees.

‘It’s very difficult,’ said Mathias, pursing his lips. ‘It’s a hole that’s been filled in again with exactly the same earth. It’s invisible. So someone dug a hole, but where?’

‘You can’t find it?’ asked Adamsberg, suddenly anxious.

‘Not by looking.’

‘How, then?’

‘With my fingers. When you can’t see anything, you can always feel. But it takes longer.’

‘Feel what?’ asked Justin.

‘The edges of the trench, the gap between its edge and the surrounding area. Where one bit of earth meets another. There’s got to be a line, and it’s just a matter of finding it.’

Mathias ran his fingers over the apparently uniform surface of the soil. Then he seemed to dig his fingertips into a phantom crack, which he slowly followed. Like a blind man, Mathias was not actually looking at the ground, as if the illusion provided by his eyes might have spoiled the search; he was concentrating entirely on his sense of touch. Gradually he traced the outline of a rough circle about one metre fifty across, which he then redrew with the tip of the trowel.

‘I’ve got it now, Adamsberg. I’m going to dig it out myself, so that I can follow the sides of the hole, if you can get your men to take the earth away. That’d be quicker.’

Eighty centimetres down, Mathias looked up, pulled off his shirt, and put his hands over the sides of the hole.

‘I don’t think whoever it was was burying anything. We’re too deep now. He was trying to reach the coffin. There were two people.’

‘Correct.’

‘One was digging and the other was emptying the bucket. At this point, they swapped over. No two people handle a pickaxe the same way.’

Mathias took up the trowel again and plunged into the hole. They had borrowed spades and buckets from the keeper, and Justin and Veyrenc were emptying the soil out. Mathias held out some gravel to Adamsberg.

‘When they filled it in, they picked up a bit of gravel from the alleyway. The one with the pickaxe was getting tired, his strokes are less straight. They haven’t buried anything in here – the hole’s quite empty.’

The young man continued to dig for an hour in silence, breaking it only to say: ‘They’ve swapped over again’ and ‘They’ve changed the pickaxe for something smaller.’ Finally, Mathias stood up and leaned his elbows on the edge of the hole, which was now more than waist-deep.

‘By the state of the roses,’ he said, ‘I suppose the man in the grave hasn’t been there long.’

‘Three and a half months. And it’s a woman.’

‘Well, this is the parting of the ways, Adamsberg. I’ll leave the rest to you.’

Mathias pressed his hands on the edges of the hole and jumped out.

Adamsberg looked in.

‘You haven’t reached the coffin. They stopped before it?’

‘I’ve reached the coffin. But it’s open.’

The men of the squad exchanged glances. Retancourt moved forward. Justin and Danglard stepped back.

‘The wood of the lid has been forced in with a pick and pulled off. More earth has fallen inside. You called me to explore the earth, not the corpse. I don’t want to see it.’

Mathias put his trowel back in his pocket and rubbed his large hands on his trousers.

‘Marc’s uncle’s expecting you for supper some day, you know,’ he said to Adamsberg.

‘Yes.’

‘We don’t have much money these days. Let us know ahead of time, so Marc can pinch a bottle and something to eat. Rabbit, shellfish? Would that do you?’

‘That would be perfect.’

Mathias shook hands with the commissaire, smiled briefly at the others, and loped off, carrying his shirt over his arm.